Hitch’s most iconic decade – a decade of Technicolor grandeur and peril inflicted on famous blondes – came to an end in 1964 with Marnie, a critical and box office flop which wounded Hitchcock’s ego and left him unsure how to move forward in a changing world. His subsequent four final films – Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot – are the result of his efforts to mix up his formula for an era in which he felt ripped off by James Bond and mourned the decline of the Golden Age stars.

(00:00) Presenting Alfred Hitchcock

(06:49) Hitchcock, Psycho, and the Rise of Television

(10:47) Marnie and Tippi Hedron

(20:06) Hitchcock/Truffaut

(26:20) Torn Curtain: Hitch vs. Newman

(35:26) Topaz: “A most unhappy picture to make”

(45:00) Frenzy: Hitchcock’s Most Explicit Film

(55:51) Family Plot: Hitchcock Slows Down

This episode was originally released on April 11, 2017. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.

The quintessential “Hitchcock blonde,” Grace Kelly had an apparently charmed life. Her movies were mostly hits, her performances were largely well-reviewed, and she won an Oscar against stiff competition. Then she literally married a prince. Was it all as perfect as it seemed? Today we’ll explore Kelly’s public and private life (and the rumors that the two things were very different), her working relationship with Hitchcock, her Oscar-winning performance in The Country Girl, the royal marriage that took her away from Hollywood and Kelly’s very specific spin on blonde sexuality.

Vincente Minnelli was the ultimate creature of the studio system, spending twenty years working for MGM and perfecting a distinct brand of big-budget, beautifully designed, often musical entertainment, from Meet Me in St. Louis to An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful to Gigi. Minnelli’s late period begins with two films he made toward the end of his run at MGM, his proto-psychedelic remake of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) and Two Weeks in Another Town, which painted such a caustic picture of moviemaking decadence that MGM forcibly recut it. Knocked off his game, with both his faculties and his power waning, Minnelli made a trilogy of films about reincarnation and rebirth, one of which starred his famous daughter, Liza.

(00:00) Minnelli's Forgotten Masterpiece

(06:08) The Ultimate Creature of the Studio System

(09:51) Inventing the MGM Musical

(12:48) Was Judy Garland's Husband Gay?

(19:16) Gigi

(24:12) Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

(43:27) Orgies and Nervous Breakdowns

(52:11) Minnelli's My Fair Lady

(56:09) Barbra Streisand's Past Lives

(01:01:20) Liza

This episode was originally released on December 1, 2015. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.

Lana Turner, the legendary "Sweater Girl" was one of MGM’s prized contract players, the epitome of the mid-century sex goddess on-screen and an unlucky-in-love single mom off-screen who would burn through seven husbands and countless affairs. After nearly twenty years as a star not known for her acting prowess, Turner's career suddenly got interesting in the late 1950s, when the hits The Bad and the Beautiful, Peyton Place and Imitation of Life sparked a reappraisal of her talents. In the middle of this renaissance, Turner became embroiled in one of Hollywood history’s most shocking scandals: the murder of Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato at the hand of her 14 year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane.

In the 1960s, many American directors saw their fortunes turn after they notched massive hits. In the case of Howard Hawks – a director who had thrived in virtually every Hollywood genre since the late silent era– the undisputed masterpiece of Rio Bravo gave way to four poorly-received efforts, each of which bared the marks of a dying studio system, if they weren’t compromised by the literal dying off of the previous generation of stars. In the middle of this run, Hawks made Red Line 7000, a car racing drama which was at once familiar and personal to Hawks, and also totally foreign in that it was a movie set in the 1960s, infused with ‘60s sexual politics, and built around future New Hollywood star James Caan. 

(00:00) Intro
(01:33) The Auteur Theory
(10:53) Hawks the Man's Man and the Hawksian Woman
(15:03) Need for Speed
(18:20) William Faulkner in Ancient Egypt
(21:45) Megalomania
(26:38) European Exile
(29:03) Rio Bravo
(32:11) On Safari for Hatari!
(38:16) Man's Favorite Sport
(42:25) Hawks's Sexual Revolution Movie
(51:42) The Worst Night of Hawks's Professional Life
(54:36) El Dorado
(57:43) Accusations of Manipulating/Abusing Women
(01:03:49) "It must be a nation of morons."
(01:09:09) Hawks Dies After Tripping Over Dog

This episode was originally released on September 9, 2014. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.

Humphrey Bogart is perhaps the most enduring icon of grown-up masculine cool to come out of Hollywood’s first century. But much of what we think of when we think of Bogart — the persona of the tough guy with the secret soft heart, his pairing on-screen and off with Lauren Bacall — coalesced late in Bogart’s life. Today we take a look at how Humphrey Bogart became Bogey, tracing his journey from blue blood beginnings through years of undistinguished work and outright failure (both in the movies and in love), to his emergence in the early 1940s as a symbol of wartime perseverance who could make sacrifice seem sexy. Finally, we’ll look at what it took to get him to take the leap into a fourth marriage that seemed to saved his life … until the world’s most glamorous stoic was faced with cancer.

Born in the 19th century, his career forged in the silent era, John Ford helped to invent the genre of the Western and still holds the record for the most Best Director Oscar wins of all time. Though he made films in all genres, and sometimes even tackled the same historical territory from different angles in different films, Ford had by the 1960s become synonymous with depictions of American history that honored maverick white men, while often villainizing, distorting or erasing Native Americans. In this episode, we will talk about the influence of Ford’s last masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and will look at Ford’s last two films, which to some extent feel like “mea culpas” for the offenses of his earlier career: the revisionist Western Cheyenne Autumn, and the female-centric adventure film 7 Women.

(00:00) John Ford, Master of Manifest Destiny

(07:59) John Ford, Joan Didion and John Wayne

(15:37) Honorary Navajo in Monument Valley

(36:22) Printing the Legend

(41:22) Hawaiian Holiday

(46:37) The "Mea Culpa" Era

(58:47) Noble Failure or Turkey?

(01:01:30) A Liminal Lesbian Classic

(01:10:01) "I don't like porn!"

This episode was originally released on June 3, 2020. Listen to help prep for the next episode of our new season, The Old Man is Still Alive.

After the death of her first husband and creative partner, Polly moves to New York, where she swiftly meets and falls in love with Peter Bogdanovich. Together Polly and Peter build a life around the obsessive consumption of Hollywood movies, with Polly acting as Peter’s Jill-of-all-trades support system as he first ingratiates himself with the previous two generations of Hollywood auteurs as a critic/historian, and then makes his way into making his own films. Together, Polly and Peter write and produce Targets, Bogdanovich’s first credited feature, and also collaborate on a documentary about the great director John Ford. By the time Polly gives birth to their first daughter, she believes she and Peter are an indivisible, equal creative partnership — regardless of how credit is distributed in Hollywood.

In the mid-1930s, Fritz Lang fled Hitler and left a successful film career in Germany behind to come to America. After a 20 year career in Hollywood, Lang went back to a much-changed Germany to make two films that he had first developed in the 1920s, set in India but largely cast with non-Indian performers in brownface. Even Lang’s collaborators were concerned that these films, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, were politically incorrect and out-of-date. How did the director behind some of the most influential films ever made end up here, and how can we understand his late movies – and his appearance as himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt – as the culmination of all that came before?

(00:00) Fritz Lang

(05:30) Femmes Fatale

(15:28) Was Lang Blacklisted?

(23:15) Marlene Dietrich and Baseball

(30:40) Newspaper Noir

(41:42) Fetishizing India in Post-Nazi Germany

(51:30) A World-Class Troll

(01:02:03) The Return of Mabuse

(01:09:22) Lang and Godard

The director of It’s a Wonderful Life, who won five Oscars in the 1930s for films that embodied the pre-World War II notion of American exceptionalism, was pushed into semi-retirement by the early 50s by changes in tastes and political priorities. Capra was brought back to the Hollywood director’s chair by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s, but Capra quickly became embittered by an industry that he felt had left him behind, and in 1971 published an autobiography airing grievances about an industry that he believed was “stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the 'patronage' of deviates and masturbators.”

(00:00) Introducing The Old Man is Still Alive

(02:11) Frank Capra

(06:22) Antisemitism and Adult Circumcision

(11:59) Fascism vs. Communism

(19:53) Propaganda

(21:55) It's A Wonderful Life

(26:22) Naming Names

(37:15) "The new look in conformity"

(01:02:03) Hitting Bottom